How to Speak with Children About Fairies

The answer, of course, is gently, and with due consideration and an appreciation for the wondrous nature of our lives and all of our thoughts, including and especially the whimsical. But extremes are best avoided, both “Nonsense! Stop imagining things!” as well as “It’s a simply wonderful fairy world where nobody ever gets sick or dies.” Both are an injustice to the spirit of childhood as well as our essential nature. Indeed we all might agree it’s important to help children discern the reality of a given situation, weighing evidence and trying out various explanations…but we’d also always want to foster wonder and creativity, the delighted encounter with actual awe and simple bafflement, and the nature of things that don’t add up but maybe they should. And right there we see one answer: draw a larger circle. Use the best methods of investigation to try to understand the most hazy topics…such as fairies. Because of course there is real magic in the world, mostly between people, but also involving animals, the weather, and the landscape, not to mention the very notion of time as we experience it. We simply have far too many touchstones of the miraculous to try to deny the existence of some very imaginative scenarios—such as pixies and sprites and fairies and the tiny little winged “butterfly people” who have been reported as helping victims in Midwest tornado towns. But they seem to exist in their own time and space, making the world around them conform to their mischievous desires for unusual outcomes. Nonsense, right? Well, when the dusk draws down and the mist starts to rise near the lonely fields and roads where it’s a little damp and a trifle spooky—in such a place, who among us has not suspected that mysterious forces were just waiting to dance by the light of the moon? And that’s what I would try to tell children about fairies and whatever else they are wondering about—look for the magic, expect that wonderful things are just about to happen, be of good cheer and keep an eye out for the Fair Folk, the sprites who might peep from a corner closet, the lights moving in the salt marsh, the things that perch in trees and the voices you hear in small waterfalls, calling from another reality not that far from our own, and sometimes even intersecting with our lives in this world—one of many worlds, it seems. I would tell them to keep careful watch and have a steady grin ready whatever may befall. In times of need we often have little else besides our wits and our smiles, after all. Best to go forth gladly, and always expect to meet the unusual—including, and especially, fairies.